the New Pantagruel

A Dialogue on the Presidential Election

by The Editors of The New Pantagruel

Editorial Introduction

n election eve, “discerning” Christians are awash with unsolicited advice and testimonies on the subject of voting. A growing chorus of Christian notables, now including Mark Noll, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Paul Griffiths, find things so decidedly unsatisfactory that they aren’t voting at all. Meanwhile, veterans of the culture wars such as Charles Colson and Jim Wallis continue to invoke the moral duties of the Church in favor of one side or the other, while the sophisticated folks at Christianity Today don’t endorse any particular candidate but do encourage the faithful not to succumb to the temptation of being a “one issue” voter.

“Ahab #3” by Scott Kolbo
Hand Colored Lithography

Our own Fr. Jape has opined on these subjects at length, arguing in less than kind terms against the foolishness of pining for an ideologically acceptable politics in which a Christian can comfortably rest, knowing that no evil is being done on his behalf. To the contrary, history is replete with the tragic lesson that political power is inherently corrupting of principle, yet the truth of principles cannot get any traction in the world without being in and of it. A moral man may choose sectarian withdrawal, itself a kind of politics by other means, or the tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities. But it is the immaturity of double-mindedness to choose one and pine for the other, and such a divided mind produces only instability where order is required.

The double-mindedness which produces electoral withdrawal as a kind of fortification against compromised engagement in the rest of one’s life is a symptom of the troubling trend among Christians to cocoon themselves in the “misunderstood minority” identity and abdicate any responsibility for power while simultaneously refusing to give up what power they have. We have become exemplars of the tendency to develop a mind so principled that it succumbs to either ideologism or an idealistic paralysis that comes from seeing through all the false choices.

Institutional power is what it is—always. If a system passes through revolution to the establishment of a new regime, it will merely play its own variation on the same old problems. Or as Pete Townsend put it, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The best of our Christian political tradition teaches us, therefore, to align ourselves radically with the particular and the individual without actually believing that the institutional regime must be overthrown. One can thus work to mitigate and contain institutional power; living in love with the frail limits of existence—family, friends, community, and place—in service of truth, goodness, and beauty, yet knowing that even if good can be done, evil will be done too.

That said, the pathological death-wish of our current social and political order can hardly be understated. Our society—its businesses, schools, governments, families, communities, and even churches—has staked its economic and spiritual stability on the shifting sand of grand consumption and its exemplars: a young, single adulthood to and beyond the age of 30; childless or near-childless, “dual income,” “professional” couples; the managerial home in which children are shuttled from one structured consumption to the next, until they are finally released to “freedom” in an institution of higher learning; and retired or pining-to-be-retired “empty-nesters.” Our economy, media, and pop-culture worship these “lifestyle” demographics and encourage and reward their aimlessly selfish carousing. This means the propagation of a culture that at every level is oriented toward the most nihilistic individualism possible; the fetishization of self and one’s “personal freedom” that led Sartre to define hell as “other people”—i.e., people who coerce and constrain us with needs and desires that can be legally circumvented.

Abortion is the jewel of this culture, and is the “single issue” in which all other issues are subsumed. It remains the worst manifestation and keystone of our gospel of self-service; a gospel which is preached and propounded by exploiters across the political spectrum, everywhere from leftist campuses to comfortably “conservative” suburbia. The metaphor is apt: the false, exploitative freedom of the self-serve soda machine in fast food restaurants is the mechanism of choice in our poisonous soup of late liberalism and consumptive capitalism. The libido seeking freedom and pleasure “chooses,” pays for, and feeds itself at a trough filled with waste and ruin.

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